I came across a great comment from Simon Phipps today, about how Microsoft have been forced to open Office, and it made me remember and revisit the great site officeshots which allow you to check out how different programs present the ODF file format. I recommend both to those of my readers interested in ODF. :)
In my spare time, I currently work on a Norwegian docbook version of the 2004 book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, to get a Norwegian text explaining the problems with the copyright law I can give to my parents and others that are reluctant to read an English book. It is a marvellous set of examples on how the ever expanding copyright regulations hurt culture and society. When the translation is done, I hope to find funding to print and ship a copy to all the members of the Norwegian parliament, before they sit down to debate the latest revisions to the Norwegian copyright law. This summer I called for volunteers to help me, and I have been able to secure the valuable contribution from at least one other Norwegian.
Two days ago, we finally broke the 50% mark. Then more than 50% of the number of strings to translate (normally paragraphs, but also titles and index entries are also counted). All parts from the beginning up to and including chapter four is translated. So is chapters six, seven and the conclusion. I created a graph to show the progress:
The number of strings to translate increase as I insert the index entries into the docbook. They were missing with the docbook version I initially started with. There are still quite a few index entries missing, but everyone starting with A, B, O, Z and Y are done. I currently focus on completing the index entries, to get a complete english version of the docbook source.
There is still need for translators and people with docbook knowledge, to be able to get a good looking book (I still struggle with dblatex, xmlto and docbook-xsl) as well as to do the draft translation and proof reading. And I would like the figures to be redrawn as SVGs to make it easy to translate them. Any SVG master around? I am sure there are some legal terms that are unfamiliar to me. If you want to help, please get in touch, and check out the project files currently available from github.
If you are curious what the translated book currently look like, the updated PDF and EPUB are published on github. The HTML version is published as well, but github hand it out with MIME type text/plain, confusing browsers, so I saw no point in linking to that version.
I dag fyller Debian-prosjektet 19 år. Jeg har fulgt det de siste 12 årene, og er veldig glad for å kunne si gratulerer med dagen, Debian!
I sommer hadde avisen Fremover et flott oppslag om bruken av Skolelinux på alle skolene der. Artikkelen var på trykk på side 4 og 5 i papirutgaven 2012-07-23, men mangler dessverre i nettutgaven av avisen. Mine henvendelser til avisen for å få artikkelen på nett har så langt ikke vært vellykket.
Artikkelen med tittelen "Narvik kommune bruker gratisprogram i skolen - Har spart millioner", forteller om hvordan bruken av Skolelinux er en stor suksess i Narvik siden det ble tatt i bruk i 2004. Her er noen fine sitater:
"- Skolelinux har spart kommunen for store pengesummer, millionbeløp, som de heller kan bruke på andre ting, sier IKT-konsulent Viggo Fedreheim."
Avisen forteller at de har fått tilgang til beregninger som viser at Narvik kommune har spart noe mellom 10 og 20 millioner kroner de siste 8 årene på å bruke Skolelinux, og fortsetter:
"Regnestykket tar høyde for sparte kostnader til lisenser som medfølger de alternative operativsystemene, lavere driftskostnader og lengre levetid på datautstyret. Totalt har Narvikskolen en maskinpark på 1600 maskiner fordelt på de 11 skolene fra Skjomen i sør til Bjerkvik i nord."
Viggo Fedreheim sier dette om hvor noe av gevinsten kommer fra:
"- Vi kan gjenbruke gamle maskiner i skolen som er for dårlig andre steder i kommunen der de ikke bruker Skolelinux. Levetiden på en datamaskin blir 3-5 år lenger med Skolelinux. Vi kaller det for grønn IT, miljøvennlig IT."
Her er det mulighet for flere kommuner å få et godt IT-system på skolene, hvis de er villige til å forsøke. De som ikke har kompetanse innomhus kan kjøpe det fra en av de kommersielle leverandørene av Skolelinux-tjenester, som Skolelinux Drift AS (der jeg er styremedlem). Komplett liste er tilgjengelig via wikien.
Update 2012-08-16: Today I was allowed by Fremover to put the PDF I received from them with a copy of the article on the Internet. It is now available in the Skolelinux press archive.
In docbook one can specify the language used at the top, and the processing pipeline will use this information to pick the correct translations for 'chapter', 'see also', 'index' etc. And for most languages used with docbook, I guess this work just fine. For example a German user can start the document with <book lang="de">, and the document will show up with the correct content with any of the docbook processors. This is not the case for the language I am working with at the moment, Norwegian Bokmål.
For a while, I was confused about which language code to use, because I was unable to find any language code that would work across all tools. I am currently testing dblatex, xmlto, docbook-xsl, and dbtoepub, and they do not handle Norwegian Bokmål the same way. Some of them do not handle it at all.
A bit of background information is probably needed to understand this mess. Norwegian is not one, but two written variants. The variants are Norwegian Nynorsk and Norwegian Bokmål. There are three two letter language codes associated with these languages, Norwegian is 'no', Norwegian Nynorsk is 'nn' and Norwegian Bokmål is 'nb'. Historically the 'no' language code was used for Norwegian Bokmål, but many years ago this was found to be å bad idea, and the recommendation is to use the most specific language code instead, to avoid confusion. In the transition period it is a good idea to make sure 'no' was an alias for 'nb'.
Back to docbook processing tools in Debian. The dblatex tool only understand 'nn'. There are translations for 'no', but not 'nb' (BTS #684391), but due to a bug (BTS #682936) the 'no' language code is not recognised. The docbook-xsl tool chain only recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'. The xmlto tool only recognise 'nn' and 'nb', but not 'no'. The end result that there is no language code I can use to get the docbook file working with all of these tools at the same time. :(
The correct solution is to use <book lang="nb">, but it will take time before that will work with all the free software docbook processors. :(
Oh, the joy of well integrated tools. :/
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